Chuck Cowdrey did not return from Vietnam to parades and banners. People spit at him, they yelled “baby killer.”
by Arnaldo Rodgers
“We were treated like dirt,” Cowdrey said Thursday as he looked upon “The Moving Wall,” a traveling memorial to Vietnam War veterans that remembers those who died and honors those who returned to little recognition.
As Cowdrey and Rudy Krantz, both veterans from Covina, watched the opening ceremony at Covina Park, emotions and memories flooded back. Cowdrey choked up as volunteers presented roses in honor of the 21 Covina residents who died serving during the war.
“Chills ran down your spine,” Cowdrey said. “If you were there, you knew.”
Whenever the memorial is within 50 miles, Cowdrey goes to see it.
The Moving Wall is a half-sized replica of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Its founder John Devitt built the replica with other veterans after attending the dedication of the Wall in 1982. He wanted to share the experience with those who could not see the original. According to the organization, two of the replicas travel the country from April through November. The memorial honors the 58,300 people who died during the war.
This is the third time The Moving Wall has stopped in Covina, with past stops in 1998 and 2008, said Councilman Kevin Stapleton.
“If you don’t honor their memory by doing things like this, it diminishes their service,” Stapleton said, who recognized the names of friends. “It’s personal to me, but it’s also important from a civic and cultural standpoint that we acknowledge them. It’s a acknowledgement that there is a sacrifice for a wearing a uniform in the United States of America.”
The traveling memorial stays open 24 hours a day until Oct. 27. Volunteers operating in shifts will be available to help locate names and provide materials for paper etchings.
“The people who need this wall the most won’t come when there is a crowd,” Stapleton said. “You’ll see them at 3 a.m. crouched in front of it.”
Vietnam Veteran Richard Davis from La Verne had only seen the original Wall in Washington. The size of the travelling one— stretching from one end to the other in Covina Park — surprised him.
“It’s very impressive,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be anything like this.”
Davis paused in front of the name of Army Specialist Donald Ward Evans Jr., a Medal of Honor recipient and a friend from before they joined the military. Evans, born in Covina, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for dashing across an open area under fire to help wounded soldiers during Vietnam. He saved several men before being seriously injured by a grenade, according to his Medal of Honor citation. Disregarding his own injuries, he continued to help wounded soldiers until he was killed while treating a wounded man. For Davis, the Moving Wall exists to honor those who died.
For others, like veteran Lloyd Johnson of West Covina it also helps and honors those who returned home.
“For us Vietnam veterans, it’s not only a time for remembering, it’s a time for healing,” Johnson said. “You move on with your life, but you can never forget what you went through.”
“This is for everybody to say, ‘we’ll never forget them again,’” he said.
Johnson greeted his fellow veterans with the same message many expected to hear when they returned from the war, a message lost in the 1970s to the anti-war movement: “Thank you for your service, and welcome home.”
A Remembrance Ceremony is scheduled from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday. Its next and final stop of the year will be in Danville, Illinois.
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Good to know it’s still out there on the road. Even though 9/10ths of the people who served in Vietnam were rear echelon and never heard a shot fired everyone becomes an ex-infantry pointman when the wall is in town. We vets have proved ouselves to be amazing liars.
The people ;who didn’t get a monument because they went to Canada to avoid the draft and refused to serve in a war the US had no business ever fighting probably need some acknowledgement this late in the day. If it hadn’t been for them, and the demonstrations on the streets opposing the war we’d probably still be pouring men and equipment into the meat grinder there.
It ought to be interesting to see what sort of monument the all volunteer vets of Gulf Wars 1 and 2, Afghanistan and whatever the one they’re cooking up now turns out to be.
I said we vets are liars, but we’re generally harmless about it, wearing our VETERAN caps and strutting around as though we actually did something worth some gratitude from other citizens. But more pointedly we were chumps, and we still are.
Nobody who’s served in the US military since 1945 has done a thing to ‘protect our freedoms’. If we’d been smarter maybe we’d still have a lot of those freedoms they took away while they were pointing overseas to enemies who want to take away our freedoms.
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